fraid of her. If she talks to me, I feel
something like having gulped a bottle of wine. Some women you have a
respect for; some you like or you love; some you despise: with her, I
just feel I'm intoxicated."

Major Waring eyed him steadily. He said: "I'll unriddle it, if I can, to
your comprehension. She admires you for what you are, and she lets you
see it; I dare say she's not unwilling that you should see it. She has a
worship for bravery: it's a deadly passion with her."

Robert put up a protesting blush of modesty, as became him. "Then why,
if she does me the honour to think anything of me, does she turn against
me?"

"Ah! now you go deeper. She is giving you what assistance she can; at
present: be thankful, if you can be satisfied with her present doings.
Perhaps I'll answer the other question by-and-by. Now we enter London,
and our day is over. How did you like it?"

Robert's imagination rushed back to the downs.

"The race was glorious. I wish we could go at that pace in life; I
should have a certainty of winning. How miserably dull the streets look;
and the people creep along--they creep, and seem to like it. Horseback's
my element."

They drove up to Robert's lodgings, where, since the Winter, he had been
living austerely and recklessly; exiled by his sensitiveness from his
two homes, Warbeach and Wrexby; and seeking over London for Dahlia--a
pensioner on his friend's bounty; and therein had lain the degrading
misery to a man of his composition. Often had he thought of enlisting
again, and getting drafted to a foreign station. Nothing but the
consciousness that he was subsisting on money not his own would have
kept him from his vice. As it was, he had lived through the months
between Winter and Spring, like one threading his way through the
tortuous lengths of a cavern; never coming to the light, but coming
upon absurd mishaps in his effort to reach it. His adventures in London
partook somewhat of the character of those in Warbeach, minus the
victim; for whom two or three gentlemen in public thoroughfares had been
taken. These misdemeanours, in the face of civil society, Robert made no
mention of in his letters to Percy.

But there was light now, though at first it gave but a faint glimmer,
in a lady's coloured envelope, lying on the sitting-room table. Robert
opened it hurriedly, and read it; seized Dahlia's address, with a brain
on fire, and said:

"It's signed 'Margaret Lovell.' This time she call